Pirouette & Pageantry

At the end of the prologue to The Sleeping Beauty, New York City's then Mayor William O'Dwyer leaned over into the next Golden Horseshoe box and addressed a duchesslike lady named Ninette de Valois, directress for 20 years of the Sadler's Wells Ballet Company and later Dame of the British Empire. "Lady," said Hizzoner, "you're in."

That was during the first U.S. appearance of Sadler's Wells six years ago--and Sadler's Wells has been in ever since. Last week, back in the U.S. for the fourth time, it was greeted by New Yorkers as an old friend. Indeed, it had not changed. Along with its 48 tons of imposing scenery and costumes, it brought a repertory that included a familiar full-length Swan Lake, a new production of Coppelia, a restaging of Fokine's Firebird; all these are ballets reaching to a wide public that cares less for pirouettes than for the pageantry of a world peopled by kings and queens, wicked magicians and good fairies in butterfly-drawn coaches.

As usual, the epitome of that world was Margot Fonteyn, who again opened the U.S. tour with Sleeping Beauty. She was nimble and fleet, as a princess should be, poised and incredibly effortless as she accepted her suitors' greetings in the arduous Rose adagio, where even the most accomplished technician is apt to teeter unhappily as she stands stock-still on one pointe and accepts a rose from four courtiers, one after the other.

The New Ballets. Backing up Ballerina Fonteyn is an impressive company. Men are a notorious Sadler's Wells' weakness, but Michael Somes, Fonteyn's self-effacing partner, has developed into a fine danseur noble. And Brian Shaw, with his soaring leaps and flickering feet, is a dancer who can hold his own in any company. Some of the most exciting dancing is provided by the company's newest ballerina, leggy young (22) Svetlana Beriosova. She is less technically accomplished than some of the older soloists, but last week, dancing Fonteyn's role of Princess Aurora for only the fifth time, she showed the special quality that can transform a dance from a series of steps into a magical whole.

In such productions as Sleeping Beauty, Sadler's Wells puts on the kind of ballet no U.S. company can match. But Sadler's Wells has always tried manfully to prove that it could also excel in a style more up-to-date than storybook romanticism. Its success in this field has been indifferent.

This time there were four ballets new to the U.S. by the company's leading Choreographer Frederick Ashton, one by rising young John Cranko. Ashton's Scenes de Ballet was danced before a De Chirico-like architectural backdrop, proved as angularly abstract as the Stravinsky score in an intricate counterpoint of shifting groups. High point was the saucy, mincing solo of young ballerina Nadia Nerina, dancing like a flirtatious marionette to the lilting wail of an oboe.

But another new work was disastrously pretentious, a complex, often embarrassing brouhaha of heavy symbolism, mythology and sex. It told the story of Greek mythology's Tiresias, who begins as a man, is transformed into a woman, then back again. Inexplicable characters dashed in and out of the ballet, including copulating snakes and a tiny girl equipped with brass breastplates, whose face is blue-black on one side, chalk-white on the other. The production's one real merit: the sensuous dancing of dark-haired Violetta Elvin as Tiresias the Woman, and especially the moment when her partner lifts the ballerina and moves her across stage as she takes huge, slow strides as if she were running in a dream landscape.

The Real Home. John Cranko's Lady and the Fool was a romantic period piece set to little-known Verdi music--the story of an imperious beauty, well danced by statuesque Beryl Grey, who spurns aristocratic lovers and goes off with a clown. If the choreography seemed unoriginal and the story flimsy, the dandies were properly elegant, the flirts suitably flouncy, the clown appealingly sad.

All in all, the Sadler's Wells foray into modernism so far has produced nothing to match the austere abstractions of the New York City Ballet, the Times Square gaieties and psychological thrillers of Ballet Theater. But Dame Ninette's charming people are truly at home and unsurpassed in the dazzling Never-Never-Land of romantic ballet.

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